OBJECTS AND METHODS OF ADULT INSTRUCTION.

Mechanics' Institutes, to answer their end, must become more educational and practical. Miscellaneous lectures and general readings are not study. A man, after listening to such lectures, and reading good books during a whole life, might not understand a simple science, or be master of a single department of human knowledge. His information, like his reading, would be crude, undigested, not always available when wanted, and very little of it probably connected with his own particular vocation. It would also be much less in amount than if he had applied the same time in regular and systematic study. No patent process has yet been discovered, no royal road yet found out, which will impart to a man the power of knowledge, without going through the labour needful to acquire it.

Education is not an affair of childhood and youth, it is the business of the whole life. The infant and day school but commence education. The education that should cease with youth Avould soon pass away as a dream. It is found that even the ability to read and write is lost in multitudes of instances simply for want of opportunity for using it. This is the case equally with more advanced knowledge.

What, then, is the instruction which Mechanics’ Institutes should offer to the woi-king classes? The answer is twofold. There is an instruction which they should receive to fit them for the position of members of a civilised community, and there is an instruction specially adapted to their individual vocations. We shall offer a few remarks on each of these.